Volume 13 , Issue 50

Tips for esearching Hungarian Names

Tracing your family in Hungary relies on two key ingredients: the immigrant's name and the ancestral town or village. To use Hungarian records, you need to know your ancestors' original name in the old country, which might have changed multiple times after their arrival in America.

Two more naming traditions to be aware of: Hungarians commonly put their family names before their given names, the reverse of most Western cultures. And women often will not appear by their own name, but by adding the suffix -ne to her husband's.

Another good resource is a Hungarian book (published in Hungarian, so you will need a translator) published in 1895 with 15,000 19th-century Hungarian name changes. It provides the new and old surname, occupation, place, names of children taking the new surname, year the change was authorized and more.

This is the link to the book written in Hungarian - It's digitized in Google Books. If you find a translation, I would love to have a copy.

Hungarian records are stored and organized geographically by county, district and locality. County and district borders moved and names changed. You will also encounter misspellings and mistranscriptions in US sources, so it's important to determine the correct names.

Before 1918, many Hungarian records listed both a village and county name.   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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